Myth, art, literature, film, and other discourses are replete with depictions of evil plants, salvific plants, and human-plant hybrids. In various ways, these representations intersect with “deep-rooted” insecurities about the place of human beings in the natural world, the relative viability of animalian motility and heterotrophy as evolutionary strategies, as well as the identity of organic life as such. Plants surprise us by combining the appearance of harmlessness and familiarity with an underlying strangeness. The otherness of vegetal life poses a challenge to our ethical, philosophical, and existential categories and tests the limits of human empathy and imagination. At the same time, the resilience of plants, their adaptability, and their integration with their habitat are a perennial source of inspiration and wisdom. Plants and Literature: Essays in Critical Plant Studies examines the manner in which literary texts and other cultural products express our multifaceted relationship with the vegetable kingdom. The range of perspectives brought to bear on the subject of plant life by the various authors and critics represented in this volume comprise a novel vision of ecological interdependence and stimulate a revitalized sensitivity to the relationships we share with our photosynthetic brethren.

Collection : Critical Plant Studies

Année de publication 2014

ISBN 978-90-420-3748-9

Support Livre broché

Format 15 x 22

Numéro dans la collection 1

Nombre de pages 270

Illustrations couleur

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Randy Laist: Introduction

Betsy Winakur Tontiplaphol: The Progress of Vegetation: Subversion and Vegetarianism in Mansfield Park

Lynne Feeley: Plants and the Problem of Authority in the Antebellum U.S. South

Akemi Yoshida: Temptation of Fruit: The Symbolism of Fruit in Christina Rossetti’s “Goblin Market” and in the Works of D. G. Rossetti and J. E. Millais

Graham Culbertson: This is Your Brain on Wheat: The Psychology of the Speculator in Frank Norris’ The Pit

Stacey Artman: Refusing Form: A Reading of Art, Americanism, and Feminism through Plant Imagery in Susan Glaspell’s The Verge

Ria Banerjee: Surviving the City: Resistance and Plant Life in Woolf’s Jacob’s Room and Barnes’ Nightwood